Help Wired.com Crowdsource This Song

Now, we’re going to try to find out if it can improve music collaboration by removing the barriers of space and time.

The idea? Have Wired.com readers help create a song using Indaba Music, whose recently revamped, collaborative digital-audio-workstation platform, Mantis, allows musicians and amateurs all over the world to collaborate on the same piece of music for free. (There’s also a premium version with more effects.)

Wired.com's Eliot Van Buskirk lays down the bass line for this crowdsourced song. Photo: Nate Lew, Indaba Music head of marketing and business development

So, intentionally ignoring the lesson we should learn from the cacophony of comments sections, we hereby invite you to record your voice, electric guitar, iPad bagpipes or whatever else you can think of onto the song I created with Indaba staff.

It’s an experiment in crowdsourcing, which we’re hoping will result in something of musical value.

Who knows — maybe we’ll end up with a hit on our hands.

To create the backing track, Indaba Music’s Josh Robertson harvested the beat from his library, I laid down some bass lines over that on Friday afternoon, and Indaba Music co-founder Dan Zaccagnino added guitar.

Robertson isolated the best parts of my improvised melodies into loops on Sunday, and taking into account a few of my production suggestions, arranged them with Zaccagnino’s guitar to create the basic framework of this song. One more pass with guitar, and we were good to go.

Here’s how the backing track sounds before anyone else has gotten their hands on it:

We designed this session to include a full rhythm section, so even if the only musical instrument you have access to is your voice, you should be able to add your part to the song with nothing more than the mike in your laptop. And if you’re a more accomplished musician, please, give this a shot.

If this works, our biggest problem will be how to fit everyone in the van when we go on tour.

Participants: There are two ways to do this.

Option 1 (Recommended)
Go to the session’s page on Indaba, create an account if you don’t already have one, and plug in your instrument or mike. Click Join to become a member of the session, and Record, Edit Mix to launch the Mantis console.

On the Mantis console, choose “Let’s Write a Song with Wired” and “Mix #1.” Listen to what we’ve done, and add your own part to the mix. (Or, if you’d prefer to use another DAW, simply download the stems from the session page and import them into that.)

Option 2 (No sign-up required)
You can dabble around with the song or find out if it’s worth your time without making a permanent contribution using the demo version — no Indaba account required.

Indaba Music senior director of operations Josh Robertson handled the engineering and production. The rest is up to you. Photo: Eliot Van Buskirk/Wired.com

We can’t wait to see what the Wired.com community does with this. After, say, three weeks, we’ll post the results, at which point we’ll most likely launch a remix contest. If all goes as planned, we will have made beautiful music together. The results will be licensed using a Creative Commons Attribution license, so even if you don’t like the final version you can re-mix it.

So get to playing, people, and don’t be shy. We’re looking for rappers, singers, guitarists, keyboardists, gong players or whatever else you have going on, and we know there’s some talent out there.